As far as we know, the Sidekick 3 was the first big mobile device to come out with a trackball. (No, that old Powerbook doesn’t count, you know what we mean) One of our readers pointed out the BlackBerry Pearl that was officially announced recently. We headed over to Gizmodo to check out some good pics of it. It looks way too similar to the trackball found on the Sidekick 3. We’re just speculating at this point and I’m no lawyer, but I wonder if Danger has any sort of claim to this. We all know they’re patent lawyers are all over the signature screen flip. What about the other aspects of the device?

Everyone knows that custom paint jobs on Sidekicks have been around since the days of the black and white Sidekick. We’ve seen all colors of the rainbow and then some. And we’ve also seen people try to pass these off as “special edition” Sidekicks from time to time. Usually it’s just to look cool or to joke around with people, but it looks like someone is trying to scam some unenlightened people on eBay with this auction.

The auction immediately throws up some warning flags. We’re not sure when Samsung started making Sidekicks or how a “Never Opened” phone has a picture of it. And why would T-Mobile be giving away an unlocked device? We noticed the tag on the photo pictured in the auction wasn’t tied to the seller, and tracked down the original auction the photo came from. In the original auction, it clearly states that this was a custom paint job. Our sources say there were no black devices that came from Danger or T-Mobile.

So save your money, go get a can of spray paint and make your own black Sidekick 3.

We are back from Burning Man and glad to be back to a location where we can get our daily “G” fix. We’re going through emails, posts, etc slowly, so bear with us if you sent something in. We also wanted to let everyone know that our Sidekick 3 themes site: sk3themes, which has been suffering because the host couldn’t keep up, will be moving to a new server and hosting company shortly. You should see those “503: Service unavailable” messages disappear by the end of the week. And with those updates, now on ot more Sidekick 3 news…